“WOW – I’ve always wanted to do that, but
I’m not creative enough.”
Or alternatively, the other person’s eyes
light up like a solar flare as they respond:
“I have a story that needs to be told,
wanna write it?”
I tell those people to go write it
themselves.
“But I’m not a creative person,” they
usually fight back.
We all have some element of creativity
buried deep within ourselves – it is just a matter of digging within to uncover
it.
Without creativity, you wouldn’t be reading
this blog right this very second. The first sign of creativity is a sense of
curiosity – and it is that sense of “need to know” which drove you this far in
this blog.
Curiosity drives us to do many things. From
the simple, such as clicking on a blog and reading it through, to the more
adventurous – reading a blog, becoming inspired to write your own, to the more
– uh er – well you decide – tasting that mysterious brown clump of food that’s
been sitting at the back of your fridge for the past six-months, to figure out
what it is or was.
Provided you don’t get food poisoning from
tasting mystery foods left in your fridge, creativity is driven by a sense of
curiosity – interest in the people, places and things around us.
Unless you really live in a vacuum – which
in of itself would be quite the tall tale – chances are you are curious about
something.
So curiosity is one of the key
characteristics – which we all have – of being creative. Still don’t think you
are a creative person? What if I told you there really are only three elements
to being creative – you’ve just discovered you have one, what if you have the
other two?
Ask yourself: “If I won $35 million in the
lottery today, what would I do with the money?”
Take a moment to salivate over your
winnings – thirty-five million dollars is nothing to sneeze at!
What would you do?
Would you buy a new house? Get a red hot exotic
sports car? How about take a trip around the world – no! Even better than a
trip, a cruise around the world.
Just by thinking about what you’d do if you
won the lottery, you just proved you have one of the other two characteristics
embodied in being creative.
The first of the remaining two
characteristics is the ability to imagine – using your mind’s eye to see other
possibilities. Imagination is key to creativity, as curiosity drives us to
imagine what it would be like to do something, be someone else, meet a
celebrity, or win the lottery.
Psychiatrists, neural surgeons and other
medical experts on human thought patterns and brain activity still don’t know
much about how our brains actually work. They have told us that our brains are
electro-chemical nerve centers, where each thought – a neuron of electronic and
magnetic impulses – whizzes from one nerve center in the brain to another one faster
than they can realistically measure.
But one thing most of these experts agree on
is that our dreams are our mind’s way of sorting and organizing the infinite
amounts of sensory data we collected since our last deep sleep. We imagine many
things when we sleep – that’s our mind sorting out all the information into
bits and pieces.
Very often we influence our dreams, by
adding in our own wants, needs and desires. Maybe you wanted to say something
to that mysterious person you ran into on your way to the office, but didn’t
have the courage – but in your dreams, you are the boss – anything goes.
As your mind goes about its sorting and
organizing of information, you dream a nice dream, where you tell that
mysterious person what you wanted, and then the adventure begins. It is sort of
like a play within a play – your mind is dreaming what you want, while cataloging all the other information collected since your last deep sleep (to
be scientifically accurate, since your last Rapid Eye Movement (REM) deep sleep
cycle).
We all dream – even if we don’t remember our
dreams. Unless you don’t sleep – ever – then chances are you dream. The average
human being can only go for seven-days without REM sleep, before suffering
nasty side effects – such as sleep apnea, depression, anxiety, and eventually
death.
I take it because you’re reading this blog,
you’ve probably had an REM deep sleep cycle within the past seven days. Which
means you’ve dreamt. Which means you’ve now experienced two of the three key
characteristics of creativity:
- Curiosity
- Imagination
Only one more key characteristic and you too will be oozing creativity.
Okay, the third key characteristic of
creativity is the hardest one to acquire. You might as well stop reading this
blog and give up now – there’s no way YOU could possibly have it – is there?
You might as well just point and click your
mouse to the next web site you were going to check out before stopping here.
Still here?
Good.
You just proved you have the third key
trait of creativity.
Determination – the will to complete
something to its conclusion. The desire to see things through. The need to read
to the end of the book, or in this case, blog.
You’re almost done! And you have all three
key characteristics of being creative:
- Curiosity – the driving force which compels us to seek things out.
- Imagination – the ability to visualize alternative realities, paths, roads, outcomes.
- Determination – the desire to see things through until the end.
YOU are a creative person!
Now go out there and put your creative
juices to the test – do something – well – creative!
